A variety of computing platforms exist in today's computing environment (e.g., UNIX, DOS, MAC, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, Windows NT, Palm). Even more computing platforms are being developed and will be developed in the future. This wide variety of computing platforms may present problems for software developers, for example, requiring software developers to provide users with software programs compatible with the existing computing platforms.
Requiring compatibility of the software programs with multiple computing platforms often creates a number of problems for software developers. For example, developers may need to utilize programmers skilled in a variety of computing platforms. Different programmers working on the same software program may generate code that works differently on different computing platforms. It is especially hard to ensure that the code is identical to each other since the code may be written in different languages for different computing platforms.
Developing software programs compatible with several platforms may significantly increase the cost of these programs and extend the time required to bring the program to market. Also, there may be more expenses and difficulty to update such software programs.
Another problem with existing technologies is that they often utilize data files or data structures in binary format to generate output files for a variety of computing platforms. The binary format may cause problems as the processing units of different computing platforms may encode numbers in different byte orders (e.g., Motorola processors may encode numbers differently than Intel processors), requiring special flags and corresponding code to compensate for these differences. In addition, data files in binary structure form are fixed in size, requiring special fields and code to accept changes in content. Including formatting rules as part of each data file allows validation information to be contained therein in a form consistent with each specific version of the file. Otherwise, special efforts must be made to continuously update consistency checks in differing modules. Having data in an extendible format compensates for version skew in older project files and older programs. Otherwise, special efforts must be made to compensate for unexpected new fields and missing fields that have been deprecated.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method that simplifies the process of creating software programs for a variety of existing computing platforms or, for example, of developing code generation on different platforms intended for the target platform.